Rice Farmers In China Create Stunning Art In Their Rice Paddies

#Beautiful: 🌾🌾🌾🌾🌾🌾🌾 7/10

We love food art videos that involve some sort of adorable teddy/pokemon shape using rice balls and some condiments, but this rice food art is far bigger than that in almost every way.

Rice farmers in China’s Liaoning province are creating art in rice paddies, and it looks incredible.

Carefully and creatively planting their harvest, the farmers use a huge area of land to create vivid images featuring anything from dragons and elephants over to QR codes. Yes, QR codes.

The giant art rice exhibition takes place every year in Shenyang, the capital of Liaoning province.

It aims to attract locals and tourists to the area, but also serves as a beautiful viewpoint of colourful rice paddies and farmer craftsmanship.

To create the illusion of different colours and shades, the Xibo farmers plant different strains of rice.

As these grow and develop, they appear to be anything from light and dark green over to blue and grey.

The local tradition serves not only as stunning visual art, but is also deeply rooted in local belief.

Through the beautiful and masterful creation of images in the fields, the farmers believe to be conducting a form of prayer, and receive blessings on their harvest.

As the years have passed, more and more farmers create more detailed pieces. New technology allows for adjusting the height of crops, which results in a 3D effect from above. After all, the images are best enjoyed from above, up where tourists can appreciate them from standalone bridges and the food gods can bless them drooling up from their clouds.

The subject of the rice art is also changing. These days the rice paddies flourish in both traditional oriental and modern designs – ranging from a Chinese fire dragon over to a playful (perhaps scannable?!) QR code. Farmers plan out well in advance what they wish their field to portray, often producing detailed sketches of how they want their work to look.

And here you were thinking farmers couldn’t be artists. Pfft.

All Images Cr: Feature China/Barcroft Images

The whole exhibition takes place on one of the world’s largest rice fields in the world, with a finished image reaching out as far as 25 acres.

It surely beats arranging a couple of vegetables nicely on a plate, and definitely feeds more than a village.